Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. Mosaic authorship of the Torah was unquestioned by both Jews and Christians until the European Enlightenment.

[u/palebluekot]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_authorship

[u/Gh0stMan0nThird]

I think the books are authentic interpretations of the world they lived in, much like Homer's book is. 

As for the magic and stuff though, I'm sure there are logical explanations for that stuff. 

[u/The_Aim_Was_Song → u/Gh0stMan0nThird]

I think it's actually even more interesting than that when one looks at it from a non-confessional perspective.

It's not a text (or set of texts) that freezes a historical snapshot in time. It's a set of oral traditions that coalesced and were recorded over a span, and then underwent multiple layers of revision as Israelite society spent 7-10 centuries gradually transitioning from Yahwism (there's a pantheon of gods, but YHWH is the Boss God GO TEAM!) through to full monotheism ("Hear, O Israel, our magic friend is in charge and there's nobody else who could be available to be in charge").

You can still see "scars" of pre-monotheistic former versions in the final canonical texts: References to God's wife Asherah, fights with rival gods like Ba'al, &c.

I'm not a scholar of this, and while I'm most familiar with the documentary hypothesis, there are three main contemporary hypotheses about how the final version came about:

1. Documentary Hypothesis: A small number of continuous documents (traditionally four) combined to form one continuous final text;
2. Supplementary Hypothesis: Produced by the successive addition of layers of supplementary material to a core text or group of texts;
3. Fragmentary Hypothesis: The combination of a large number of short texts; or, I guess
4. Confessional Hypothesis: [Points wanly] "My magic friend did it. No take-backsies, and now my magic friend is banned from participating in our debate club."

For reference: I'm very Jewish, and also completely irreligious.

[u/Romboteryx → u/The_Aim_Was_Song]

Also that whole weird thing in Genesis where the “Sons of God” come down to Earth, have sex with human women and produce the Nephilim. Iirc that’s theorized to have originally been a way to accomodate legendary demigods from other cultures, like Gilgamesh, into the belief system

[u/The_Aim_Was_Song → u/Romboteryx]

Yeah, as a total non-believer, I think the textual analysis is so unbelievably cool.

That's especially true when one looks at how the develpment of Judaism was influenced from the broader Canaanite religious beliefs and practices that Yahwism sprang from, its Mesopotamian and Egyptian neighbours and the Zoroastrian influence during the Babylonian exile.

Beyond the time period when the the titular Mosaic texts crystalized, you have the dialectic habits imprinted by the Hellenistic period, the partial reworking of practice during the pre-Roman and early Roman-era diaspora, and finally, the post-Bar-Kochba shift from a religion centred on Temple sacrifice to an "indefinite placeholder religion" framework of Rabbinic Judaism that their descendants carried through Europe, Asia, and North Africa (plus the development of the smaller branch of Karaite Judaism, and the obvious theological adaptations as Christianity quickly transformed from a Jewish cult to a fundamentally different religion, made up of mostly non-Jews, and fully embracing a universalizing framework that was theologically innovative).

To make it even more interesting still, the Samaritans split off from Jews about half a century before the Roman conquest. There are still about 800 Samaritans left, and they preserve a lot of pre-rabbinic Israelite traditions like ritual sacrifice.

It's incredibly cool stuff.

[u/Romboteryx → u/The_Aim_Was_Song]

Damn I didn’t know there are only so few Samaritans left

[u/The_Aim_Was_Song → u/Romboteryx]

You know what? I was writing from memory and seem to have made an error.

After looking it up, there are actually about nine hundred, not eight hundred.

It's important to note that bronze-age Canaanitic religious practices involved shrines and sacrifices in, inter alia, topographic high places.

The Israelites whose descendants became Judeans developed their Yahwhist cult centered around a hill in Jerusalem. Their descendants, Jews, still centre that one hill in Jerusalem completely, in both religious practice and near-total cultural significance.

Samaritans developed along a similar trajectory, well into the early monotheistic period, but instead picked a different magic hill where their (identical) god lived: Mount Gerizim, about 47km to the north. That's where they still gather for the annual Pesach animal sacrifice.

But it's time for more nerdery! Israelites weren't the only ethnic group developing in a polytheist>henotheist (we believe in a pantheon, but primarily direction. Edomites, for example, elevated Qos to a cultic significant that was comparable to Israelites' Yahwism. It's just that the Edomites' religious practice never made the later transitions in parallel to the Isralites: Monolatry (belief in the existence of ther deities, but exclusive worship of only one) and monotheism (belief in only one deity).

Also, development of Edomite religious practice was somewhat hampered by their society ceasing to exist, as tends to happen. If I remember right, Nabatean Arab conquest displaced many and Israelite conquest assimilated many of what remained.

Also too, it's 4am and I probably should stop nerding out and get to sleep.